The Book of Aron

by Jim Shepard

  My knees still hurt from where I’d fallen and I put my hands on them. The officer did the same, and his men noticed and smiled. He squinted at me as though he’d said something funny and then straightened up and gestured to his men and they left, one of them looking back and winking before the crowd swallowed them up.

  ON THE DAY OF THE DEADLINE LUTEK AND I SPOTTED a wagon filled with magical loot—a gilded birdcage, a set of knives in a sunburst pattern in an open display case—and followed it until we had to give up because the crowds were so impossible. Lutek got mad and climbed a lamppost to search out other opportunities while I hung on to it below him. Then we heard a fanfare of horns and pie pans and the gates of the courtyard opposite us opened, and two old janitors somehow managed to part the mob on the sidewalk and a row of kids with horns and tin pans and wooden spoons turned onto the street in a line. A boy in the center held a staff with a bright-green flag and a Jewish star in a harness around his waist. More lines came out of the darkness behind them, kids of all sizes holding toys and books against their chests and singing.

  “What is it?” Lutek asked. We couldn’t hear what they were singing but the kids kept coming, at least twenty rows of them, followed by wagons piled high with wicker baskets tied with cords and cast-iron pots and floured breadboards and trunks tied with rope, crates of books and ladles and strainers, and then a wagon mounded with coal and another with potatoes. Other kids and adults wrestled over the coal and potatoes that scattered onto the cobblestones when the wagons turned onto the street. All of the wagons had red geraniums in window boxes along their sides, and beneath them decorations made from streamers. The wagon drivers were wearing homemade bird masks with plumes and feathers. We pushed closer and heard someone say it was Korczak’s orphanage that had been forced to move. And then there he was with his bald head and yellowish goatee again, the last one out before the courtyard gates swung shut behind him. He was pulling a heavy woman along by the arm and struggling to keep up with the last wagon. She was as tall as he was and seemed more frightened by the crowds.

  They were pushed into our path and for a while we were carried along behind them. I wondered if he would recognize me but he didn’t. He and the heavy woman had to shout at each other to be heard. She asked how long he thought he could go without sleeping and he shouted back that when he was a young man his mother had come into his room in the midafternoon and dragged him out of bed by his feet. “She asked if that was how I wanted to become a doctor,” he shouted. “By staying out all night long. And I told her, ‘A doctor? I thought I was studying to become a lush.’ ”

  We followed them to the gate of the small ghetto at Chłodna, where the German and Polish police were checking identification. All of the orphanage wagons had passed through except the one with the potatoes, which sat still next to the guard hut. The driver had his hands on his hips and was watching two Polish policemen unhitch his horse. He’d pulled his bird mask down and it hung below his chin. A feather fluttered alongside his ear.

  “What’s happening?” Korczak asked the Polish policeman in front of us. “Why has my wagon not gone through?”

  “This isn’t your wagon,” one of the German policemen told him. “It’s my wagon.”

  They argued in German about it. The heavy woman was terrified and tried to pull Korczak through the gate but he knocked her arm away. He shouted something at the German and then repeated it to the Polish policeman: that if the German didn’t release the potatoes he would report the theft to their superiors. The German’s bored expression disappeared and he said in Polish, “So you’re trying to frighten me, Jew?” and Lutek gave my shirt such a pull from behind that he ripped it.

  “Are you with him?” a Polish policeman said, stepping in front of us. He pointed a baton at Korczak. “Is he drunk?”

  “I don’t know what he is,” I told him, and Lutek pulled me again, and a woman with a chicken in a straw cage shouldered forward and almost knocked the policeman off his feet. He clubbed her once and then twice and Lutek shouted into my ear, “What do you think this is? A show?” and yanked me so hard that I fell to my knees, and then he pulled me to my feet and dragged me down the street.

  FAMILIES SQUATTED IN THE HALLS AND FOUGHT over sidewalks. One took over our stairwell near the top floor. They aired out their clothes and bedding on the railings. No one had said the ghetto would be closed and the markets outside the walls declared illegal. There were long lines in front of the food shops and everything was bought up. Our family of course wasn’t prepared and hadn’t saved any money. Two other families moved in with our neighbors across the hall and my mother said it was only a matter of time before someone moved in with us. When she complained about it my father reminded her that the Christian who owned the building had lived here thirty-seven years and then had to leave nearly all of her furniture behind. He cheered himself by reading the German casualty lists in the newspaper. He called it his Happy Corner. He also paid ten groszy extra for a German paper that showed photos of their cities after Allied bombing.

  The small ghetto across Chłodna we heard had attracted the well-to-do Jews and was less crowded. Our neighbor told us that across the hall they were nine to a room. The family on our stairwell took in some extra relatives and bartered old clothes and saccharine on the street in front of our building and screamed and fought in the middle of the night. In the mornings we had to step over them when going down the stairs.

  My parents fought too. My mother said we were living like castaways and the apartment was filthy and my father said if we didn’t have money for bread we didn’t have money for soap. She said that once we got the typhus we wouldn’t need money for soap and he said that once we got the typhus he’d never have to hear her complain again. My older brother told them that he didn’t think married couples should argue the way they did.

  Sometimes if the fight was bad my mother would lie down next to me and weep. I’d put my hand on her head and tell myself I didn’t care what they did because I was going wherever I wanted and doing what I wanted.

  But I wasn’t sleeping because of the lice. My mother finally boiled my sweater, which was so infested we could see it moving, but the nits survived boiling and could only be ironed out. They made gray oily stains when they melted under the iron, and were only gone for a while, since whatever we disinfected just got reinfested by everything else. It was so bad around my waistband that I looked like I was always adjusting my pants. I woke up scratching. In the morning I ran my fingernails through my scalp and dropped what I pulled out onto the hot lid of the stove so I could see them sizzle.

  I got on the trolley still scratching and a Polish policeman told me to give him my coat. It was far too small to fit him and I showed him the elbows, which were worn through, and he said, “Give it here anyway.” I said sure and added that I’d just come from the hospital and had the typhus. I combed my hair with my hand and wiped the lice on my sleeve and stepped closer to him and he moved to the rear of the car and got off at the next stop.

  My father came home from the fabric factory with what he said was good news. His cousin had converted part of the factory floor into a dormitory for refugees who could pay and so he had to let some workers go but my father hadn’t been one of them. He’d been worried about it because he and his cousin hadn’t been getting along. To celebrate he brought home bread and onions and marmalade, which we hadn’t seen since the rationing began, and which my brothers finished before I got back. We had the rest of the bread and onions with some kishke my mother made with steer intestines and some seasonings. My father didn’t read from the newspaper. A German truck went by with a loudspeaker and its only message in Polish was that it was now forbidden to speak of “the Jewish ghetto,” and the proper term was now “the Jewish quarter.” “How do you like it here in the Jewish quarter?” my father asked my mother. “I find it confining,” she told him.

  LUTEK HAD ARRANGED A WAY OUT OF THE GHETTO even before it was sealed up. He showed me one morning in a
downpour that had driven everyone else inside. Down an alley near Przejazd Street an apartment owner had built a cooplike shed with chicken wire and wood against the wall to keep people from stealing his trash bins, and inside the shed and behind the bins Lutek had chiseled out a passage that had started as a sewage drain. The smell was suffocating and when I first saw it I thought I’d never fit through. I had to go onto my back and push with my heels and squeeze one shoulder through at a time. I asked why he hadn’t made it any bigger and he said it was a lot of work and that the smaller the better and easier to hide and he liked that only we could fit through. The shed had a roof, so once we were inside no one could see us. And he’d nailed a piece of tin over the gap so even someone inside wouldn’t necessarily see it. I asked when he’d done this and he said after curfew. I said that it was amazing and he said yes, it was. I said he’d done all the work, and he agreed and said in honor of that our split would be seventy-thirty.

  So for a few weeks we made out. He made a deal with some Polish boys, a gang from Łucka Street, and for five złotys a load they kept the blackmailers away. His father’s friends brought us what they wanted to barter on the other side, and we took out linens and silverware and tools and pots and pans and whatever would fit through, and brought back flour and potatoes and milk and butter and onions and meat. Lutek could drag in twenty kilos of potatoes or onions in one go. Sometimes on the other side there were kids we recognized haggling and filling their sacks. Smaller kids hopped onto the wall and waited there like squirrels. When the police showed up everyone disappeared into their holes.

  Other gangs heard about it and started using it. When we tried to stop them they beat us. When we came back with metal pipes they outnumbered us and were bigger besides. Once they’d taken it over they made such a racket going through that one kid got caught by the Jewish police and was turned over to a German who shot him in the face. We saw him later, still in the street, with his cheek open and his back on a sewer grate. I didn’t want to look but Lutek stood over him with his hands on his hips like killing him had been his idea. Our hole had been sealed up with cement, and Lutek told me, “Three weeks, every night I worked on that.”

  First we were discouraged and then he said we’d been doing it the hard way and that one of his father’s friends was now in the Jewish police and working the gate at Leszno Street. We watched him for a day or two. All three police forces had their sentry posts, German and Polish on one side and Jewish on the other. We called the Jews the yellow police because of their armbands and the Poles and Germans the blue and green police because of their uniforms. Lutek said the Jews were watched by the yellow police and the yellow police by the blue police and the blue police by the green police and the green police by the Gestapo. And where was the Gestapo? I wanted to know, and he said “Aha!” as though I’d said something very smart. Everyone was always calling on everyone else to come over and translate for soldiers or work details passing through the gates, and during one shift the green and blue police had set up a business with Lutek’s father’s friend. “So it’s just a matter of everyone getting their taste,” Lutek said. Yellow took five, blue took ten, and green took twenty złotys per parcel. A good time to go through was when the guards had to search a lot of autos that were backed up. We just had to stand where we could see everything and then learn to wait, wait, wait. When it was safe to deal the friend would gesture for the blue policeman to come inside the gate and off we could go.

  Lutek’s father also told him about a new system for dealing with the blackmailers: once they surrounded us on the other side of the wall we called over the blue police and told them we were being robbed and that we wanted everyone taken to the station to sort things out. That was the code for the blue police to arrest us, and the blackmailers ran away. At the station we gave the blue police their cut and they let us go when the coast was clear.

  We were waiting to go through a week later when Zofia and another girl with dark curly hair walked by with two baskets of goods. They set their baskets down, chatting and laughing, and the other girl shook out her hair like she’d just taken off a hat, and they pulled off their armbands and hoisted their loads again and walked right past all three sentry posts and out of the ghetto. The green policeman even said some kind of hello as they went by. Zofia waved and said something in response that he seemed to like.

  The next day we visited her apartment to ask if she and her friend wanted to join our group. “What group?” Zofia asked, and seemed unimpressed when I told her what we had going.

  The new girl’s name was Adina. She was from Baranowicze and you could tell she was from the east from her singsong way of speaking. She said she was a year older than us. She was pale and thin with sad black eyes. She didn’t like to talk and always got angry when asked a question. She said that one day she’d come home late from dropping off some sewing and the Germans had driven her cousins out of town in a truck and forced them to jump into an open fire. Those who wouldn’t jump were shot. A cousin who escaped into the woods had told her about it. Then her whole family had been herded west with other families through three villages and those who couldn’t keep up were shot at like ducks until finally they were all loaded onto some trucks and driven into Warsaw. She said she’d brought her best clothes but that her mother had managed to bring only her ceramic stew pot loaded with three bottles of cooking oil.

  Lutek kept asking her about the fire part of her story until Zofia finally told him that if he didn’t stop she’d throw him into a fire herself.

  So I asked about the oil instead. “What are you looking at?” Adina said to me, and made a face. “He’s in love,” Lutek told her. “He worries me,” she told him back. “Why would your mother save oil?” I asked her again.

  She said her parents used to have a shop that sold oil her father had produced himself and was very proud of. He died before the war and the shop had gone downhill even before the Germans came. Her mother was bitter about it still and whenever anyone asked for credit or a favor, she always said, “Sure, it’s nice to screw on somebody else’s sheets.” Lutek said that that could be our group motto and Zofia said again what made him think there was going to be a group.

  “We might as well do something,” Adina told her. Back home she said that there’d always been something she needed to be doing but that here she went out into the street and then in no time at all she’d go back to their apartment again, since what was there for her to do in the street?

  Lutek asked what made them think they could just walk through the gates and Adina told him she’d always had a talent for that sort of thing. When they got to the city and passed through the center for refugees she told her mother that she’d hide their money and made sure she went first when her family had lined up to be searched, and a Volksdeutsche woman felt around in Adina’s hair for a long time, as though she kept her treasures there, then found a bundle in the pocket of her skirt and pulled it free and exclaimed, “And what are these? Diamonds?” and spilled them out onto a table only to discover they were hard candies. The other Volksdeutsche laughed and the woman slapped Adina’s face and threw her out of the room without finding the gold coins she was also carrying.

  WE ALL WORKED TOGETHER FOR A WEEK AND THEN an old Polish woman grabbed Adina and shouted “Smuggler! Smuggler!” when they were coming back through the gate, so Lutek grabbed the old woman and started shouting the same thing and his father’s friend had to drag all three over to the green and blue police to work the whole thing out. Zofia and I went a block away before stopping to watch. The rule with us was always if one got stopped the others walked on. The old woman made a racket we could hear from there. Zofia said Lutek had dropped whatever he’d been carrying into her bag.

  “This is going to take a while,” she said and I told her she was probably right. Neither of us had anywhere to go. She worried that Adina would be beaten even if they set her free and said she should’ve gone in her place. When she’d been caught, because of her looks
the blue policeman had beaten her but not as a Jew.

  “What makes old people like that?” she wondered. I told her I didn’t know.

  She said that a few days after the city surrendered, someone had told her mother that her father’s father, her other grandfather, wanted to see her. Zofia had never met him. He was a rabbinical scholar, she never knew what sort.

  I waited for her to go on. I was happy that we were talking like this.

  She said her parents told her that this grandfather had a lot of money, she didn’t know why, and that her mother was excited because maybe this would allow them all to emigrate. Zofia had never met him because when her father married someone non-Orthodox, his father told him that as far as he was concerned, his son had died, he’d already buried him and mourned his passing.

  “So what was he like?” I asked.

  “The one thing my father told me was that he wrote letters to God,” she said. “That seemed like an interesting idea. I wondered what he did with them.”

  “So what was he like?” I said.

  “All my mother ever said about him was that he could dig money out of the ground,” she said. Some trolley brakes screeched around the bend on Chłodna and when she touched her fingers to her mouth it made me wish she was somewhere quiet and safe. “So now I was being summoned to see him, alone, and my mother was very excited and anxious and my father was angry with her for getting everyone stirred up. I remember them fussing about what I would wear and then I was delivered to a big dark house and told to go inside. An old woman opened the door and disappeared and I went up flights of stairs. I didn’t know where I was going and I had to feel my way around the landings but I could see a light on the top floor. The top floor was a long dark room with angled ceilings. At the end of it an old man with a beard sat behind a desk piled with books. Some of the stacks reached the ceiling. There were stacks on the windowsills in the dormers. There were spiderwebs everywhere, even on his lamp, so I stopped to wait for him to say something. I finally said hello but for all I knew he was deaf. He looked up and gestured for me to come closer. I ducked under the webs as I went. When I was halfway there he held up his palm and I stopped and he watched me for a while. A clock was ticking somewhere in the room. I said hello to him again, then took a step, and again he held up his palm. So I told him who I was. His face didn’t change and he waved his hand upward for me to go away. I took a step back, to see if that was really what he meant, and he went back to his reading.”